This hurricane season, FEMA, the agency responsible for coordinating the federal disaster response, is operating without a strategic plan. This predicament highlights a broader systemic shift: Washington is shrinking the federal workforce at a pace not seen in decades, even as public confidence in government sits near historic lows.
The 2026 Harvard Youth Poll found just 15% of young Americans trust the federal government, the lowest mark in the poll’s history.
The Pew Research Center’s most recent survey found a similar low, 17%, among the general public.
Meanwhile, GAO’s workforce data shows the civilian workforce contracted by more than 250,000 employees across 22 major federal agencies between December 2024 and January 2026, an 11% overall decline.
The question for government leaders isn’t whether government can become smaller. (It can, and it has.) The question is whether it can become smaller while operating better.
History offers a precedent. The National Performance Review under the Clinton administration pursued a similar drawdown in the 1990s, calling for the elimination of 252,000 federal positions by 1999—a target Congress later increased to 272,900. Over that period, public trust in government also recovered according to Pew’s survey from the low levels of the mid-1990s, rising from the low 20s in 1994 to the 40s in 2000. While broader political and economic factors influenced that rise, including a strong economy and a budget surplus, the approach of the 1990s offers three lessons for government reform today that hold up regardless of politics.
Target work processes, not just headcount
The National Performance Review in the 1990s went beyond standard personnel cuts to focus on structural efficiency. Working with a Republican Congress, the Clinton administration cut red tape and consolidated overlapping functions, concentrating reductions in management and internal review layers rather than front-line service positions.
At the IRS today, reductions are outpacing operational redesign, and the service data shows it. The agency lost approximately 17,000 employees in 2025, or about 17% of its workforce, through deferred resignation and early-retirement programs. In July 2026, GAO reported that reduced staffing contributed to longer wait times, fewer calls answered, and delays in processing paper returns. Notably, IRS customer service representatives answered about two million fewer calls, while average wait times nearly tripled, from three minutes to eight.
At the Department of the Interior, GAO’s review of the Bureau of Indian Affairs found an 11% net workforce decline between January and July 2025, with some regional offices losing close to a third of their staff. GAO reported that agency officials said the reductions had resulted in a loss of experienced leadership and placed additional strain on short-staffed offices, while Tribal leaders reported impaired service delivery and concerns that the agency lacked adequate staff to carry out its responsibilities.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, GAO reported that the agency cut its contracting staff by about 15% between April and November 2025. VA obligated more than $78 billion in contracts in Fiscal Year 2025 and has remained on GAO’s High-Risk List for acquisition management since 2019, with 23 prior GAO recommendations still open as of January 2026. GAO’s review underscores the importance of strategic workforce planning, employee involvement, and clear mechanisms for monitoring whether reorganizations are achieving their intended results. As of February 2026, VA had not yet developed a full plan to address the workforce challenges affecting its acquisition management.
Three agencies, three different missions, but the same underlying lesson: a smaller workforce requires a deliberate redesign of how the work gets done.
Empower front-line staff to redesign work and implement AI
The 1990s reforms gave federal employees a direct role in identifying outdated rules and inefficient ways of doing their jobs. The same principle should apply today. AI can help eliminate routine administrative work, but agency leaders shouldn’t leave decisions about how to use it solely to vendors or headquarters. The employees who process claims, manage grants and answer calls often know best where time and effort are being wasted. They should help identify and redesign those processes before agencies automate them.
VA also offers a working example done well. At a House Veterans’ Affairs Committee hearing in April, VA officials testified that the average time to complete a disability claim had fallen 42%, to 81 days, while its 12-month issue-based accuracy rate reached 94%, the highest in two years. VA attributed the gains to increased productivity and a whole-lifecycle approach to claims processing that included AI and automation. The lesson isn’t that technology replaces the workforce. It’s that government can use technology to take routine work off employees’ plates, improve productivity and let them focus on the decisions that require human judgment.
Evaluate success by public experience metrics
The 1990s reinvention framework measured success against concrete customer-service standards, an approach later reinforced by statutory reporting requirements under the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993 and the GPRA Modernization Act of 2010. Agency effectiveness should continue to be judged by service delivery outcomes, such as call resolution rates, benefit processing speeds, and permit approval timelines.
Reducing headcount is a fiscal mechanism. Government reform is a management discipline. To ensure workforce contractions lead to better performance, not worse, agency leaders need honest answers to three questions:
- Are workflows being streamlined, or are essential staff simply being removed?
- Are front-line employees empowered to use tools like AI to redesign daily operations?
- Can the agency demonstrate faster, more accurate service through metrics the public can see?
Shrinking the federal workforce doesn’t automatically destroy public trust. But downsizing without operational redesign puts service performance at risk. The test of modern public administration is whether a smaller government is also a measurably better one. With the next crisis always on the horizon, we cannot afford to wait to find out.
Gene Lockwood-Shabat is a former senior federal executive with nearly three decades of public service across five federal agencies. From 2022 to 2025 he served as associate deputy assistant secretary for Planning and Performance Management at the Department of Veterans Affairs and VA’s Performance Improvement Officer.
